Abstract [en]

The thesis follows the emergence of industrial research policy in Sweden from the 1940s to the early 1980s. It reveals political principles and key considerations at stake when a group of state supported industrial research institutes were established and reorganized during the period. The institutes were knowledge producers in industries as paper and pulp, textiles, iron and steel, food, and production engineering. They were closely linked with the technical universities in Stockholm and Gothenburg and their position at the nexus of academe, state policy and industry gave the institutes a central role in managing relations between these domains

Two questions are at the core of the analysis: 1. How did political actors define the roles and responsibilities of state and industry for industrially oriented technical re-search? 2. How did they define relations between scientific knowledge production, industrial production and society?

A key hypothesis of the study is that the industrial research policy that emerged in the 1940s is to be understood as a “handshake” between an organized industry on the one hand, and the Swedish state on the other. Theoretically, the handshake was an agreement between the government’s "helping hand" and the "visible hand" of industrial organizations. The handshake implied a general agreement on the distri-bution of responsibility for technical-industrial research. Conceptually, the responsi-bility was divided so that the state financed “basic research” whereas industry fi-nanced “applied research”. The latter part of the thesis explains how the handshake was released in the 1960s as the role of the state moved more towards an active and interfering role in the Swedish economy. Formally, and in practice, this meant that the state now took responsibility for applied research, which up until then had been considered an industrial domain.